Your Search Engine Optimisation Expert – Sheldon Nesdale

When clients first become aware of Search Engine Optimisation their first question is “how do I get on the first page of Google for [insert common keyword here]“.

Eg #1: A bed and breakfast wants page one on Google for “bed and breakfast”

Eg #2: A real estate agent wants page one on Google for “real estate”

This is the short tail.

A page one placement for a generic keyword is nice (here’s one of mine: hot pools), but it’s really really hard to get.

The real money is in the long tail

The long tail is about getting first page placements for hundreds of long search phrases. This is much easier to do. (And that’s where I can help.)

Imagine for a moment that you own a Bed and Breakfast in Papamoa, Tauranga. Which would you rather have:

1. 20 visits a day from searches for “bed and breakfast”
2. Or hundreds of visits a day from a diverse range of phrases such as “where can I find a bed and breakfast near papamoa?”, or “bnb in the bay of plenty with views of the beach”

My recommendation is to go with #2.

Mainly because you probably can’t have #1, and if a Search Engine Optimisation company promises it to you, they are lying.

The “Keyword” report in Google Analytics

One of my favourite reports in Google Analytics is “Keywords”, so you can see exactly what phrases people have used in Google to find you.

Keywords that you keep getting found for appear at the top, and they are great, but the real magic is lower on the list for very long phrases that only one person has used only once.

What we want to do is grow the length of this list from 500 (for example) to 1000 a month.  Because that represents 500 extra visitors to your website that your top performing keywords would never generate on their own.

Seems pretty easy to check doesn’t it? Just type in the keywords you rank well for, and there is your website near the top of the results…

Actually that’s not your true ranking at all!

Check again using a friends computer and you’ll get a very different result.

This can be embarrassing. I did this many times at a friends houses before I figured out what was going on: “Hey, John check this out, my website is #1 for ‘xyz widgets’… hey wait a second, where the heck is it??” Stink!

Why does this happen?

Because over time Google learns about you, your search behaviour, and what results you like (through software such as browser plugins, cookies, and being signed in to your Google account).

So every time you do a Google search on your computer you are training the Google search algorithm.

Every time you click on a search result Google ticks a box to say “Yes! We gave that searcher the link they wanted!”. But everytime you return to the results using the “Back” button, Google ticks a box to say “No! That link wasn’t what they wanted, let’s try harder next time team!”.

That is one of the ways that Google incrementally improves their search results over time.

But you are just one person, and your behaviour has only a tiny impact on the world. But it has a huge impact to the search results you get from your computer!

So, you are pushing the link to your website higher up the search results because you are clicking on the link all the time (but most of the impact is confined to searches done on your computer).

How can you find out what your rank in Google really is?

There is 1 way to get a true indication of your rank in Google (actually there are many, but this is the easiest, cheapest, most accurate, non-biased way I have found).

And that is: RankTracker software.

The paid version is pretty expensive and doesn’t really add a lot of functionality.

The free version is fine (but not being able to save the reports can get a little annoying).

Download the RankTracker software and give it a try.

(And no, I don’t get paid for linking to them (yet), I just think it’s great software)

First, the definitions:

• Unique Visitors – The number of individuals who have visited your website. But, if a person on a dial-up connection disconnects and reconnects, they will be assigned a different IP address and therefore be counted as another unique visitor if they return to your website.
• Visitor – The number of visitors who have visited your website. But, again, if that person has dial-up, everytime they disconnect and reconnect, they will be considered a new visitor.
• Page Views – The number of web pages your website serves. So a single visitor may go back to your home page several times, or refresh a page, each instance counts as another page view.
• Hits – The number of files your website serves. Every time your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) loads, every time each image on your website loads, each time your php or html files load, all these count as 1 hit. So if a website has a lot of these items on its home page, a single page view of that home page may generate 40 hits. And if a website has very few items, a single view may only generate 20 hits.

Why should you care?

You should care because the method that you choose to measure your websites success is important.

In my ebook I detail how you should create a benchmark before you make the changes suggested so you can measure the difference that those changes make.

Which statistic should you use?

Unique Visitors.

• Hits is no good because you could double it overnight just by adding a few images.
• Page Views is no good because you could have pages that need lots of refreshing (F5 on your keyboard).
• Visitors is ok, but if one particular person comes back several times in one day because they keep getting interrupted, you really only want to count them once.
• Unique Visitors is the best choice (and most webstats software reports that statistic accurately)

So the next time someone says to you “my website is so cool, I get 1000 hits a day”, you can say, “Whatever! I could put 100 tiny images on my pages and generate 1000 hits an hour! How many Unique Visitors do you get a day? That’s the only number that really matters!”.

And then they say “Wow, I’ve been such a dumb arse, how did you get so smart?”, and then you say “I learnt about it at SearchEngineGuide.co.nz, you should buy their ebook, it taught me how to improve my websites position in Google“.

The following article answers 4 common questions:

1. “Do I need .co.nz, .com, .net.nz, .mobi and others?”
2. “Should our domain name just be our brand name?”
3. “Should our domain name have keywords in there too?”
4. “What about miss-spellings?”

1. “Do I need .co.nz, .com, .net.nz, .mobi and others?”

It depends on 2 things:

1. Where is your target audience?
2. What domain names are already taken?

My Advice:

• If your target audience is New Zealand only, make a .co.nz your primary domain name.
• If your target audience is international, make a .com your primary domain name.
• If you are a non-profit organisation or an association, go with .org.nz.
• Don’t bother with any of the others.
• Don’t be tempted to fall for the “land grab frenzy” that happens when new domain name extensions are released (such as .mobi). Don’t buy into the histeria.
• “But won’t a a competitor buy it if I don’t?” Perhaps. Perhaps not. In either case, you have a head start, so focus on optimising your primary domain for search engines. If you do it properly, your competitor will never catch up. Need help? I’m here for you.

2. “Should our domain name just be our brand name?”

Some brand names a quite long (take lawyers for example) so you should buy your full length domain name (eg SandersNightengaleIversonFredricks.co.nz) and the abreviation to make emailing easier (eg snif.co.nz).

3. “Should our domain name have keywords in there too?”

Yes, that is ideal. But you’ve probably already named your company so it’s too late for you.

For example I started a Marketing Consulting company recently and it was important to me to have the word “Marketing” in my domain name and brand name. So I chose “Marketing First”.

4. “What about miss-spellings?”

You will know if your brand or domain name is commonly miss-spelled. If mistakes are common, yes, buy the miss-spelled domain name (and it can stop a competitor from buying it and trying to steal business from you if your brand name is very popular).

Then you have 2 choices:

1. Either redirect the miss-spelled domain name to your primary domain name (the user-friendly option)
2. Or, leave the website with the “this website can not be found” message (some really big brands choose to do this so it forces people to get used to using the correct brand name. Sorry, I can’t think of an example right now.)

I’m sure if you are reading this you want to know more about search engine optimisation. Firstly, you’ve made the right step by finding out a bit about it yourself, well done.

But if you are considering hiring the services of a Search Consultant / Search Engine Optimisation Specialist / SEO Consultant (or whatever they call themselves), I have a word of warning: Learn a bit about it first! Otherwise its too easy for you to get ripped off!

The first thing that will strike you is that they seem to speak a different language. You will most likely get a barrage of jargon, words and phrases like “keyword placement”, “keyword density”, “meta tags”, “Google Adwords”, “Google Adsense”, “SERP’s”, “Search Engine Marketing”, “backward linking”, “reciprocal linking”… and many more.

So you need to find out about what these keywords mean, so you know what the SEO consultants are talking about (so you don’t look dumb), and armed with a little bit of knowledge about what it takes to get better results for your website in search engines, you are less likely to be ripped off.

One of the most common sales tactics that so called “Search Engine Experts” use is the “free evaluation of your website from a search engine point of view“. But how do you know that their SEO report isn’t just a copy/paste of the same report they generate for everyone? You don’t.

Remember, that their objective is to make you think that you need them. They will achieve that objective by creating a distance between your knowledge and theirs so they look like professionals that know what they are doing. And then they’ll provide you with a list of ways that you can improve your Search Engine ranking but they will make the list look complicated and difficult so you will think that you have no hope of doing it yourself and therefore need to hire them!

My ebook is the perfect way to deal with these issues.

You might not have the time or the inclination to optimise your own NZ website for search engines, but in about an hour you can learn about what really counts when your goal is to move your NZ website higher in Google’s search results, and prevent SEO sales people from dazzling you with jargon.